Inaccurate ‘primary’ label suppresses voter turnout

My fellow Californians, your government is lying to you. Without conscience or remorse. About our elections.

The lie isn’t new. It is 14 years old. And it’s a bipartisan falsehood — parroted by both political parties and defended by media across the spectrum — including, perhaps, the publication where you are reading this column.

The lie is not hidden. The state publishes it the voter guides and ballots it sends you.

What is this lie?

It’s that the spring state elections you participate in — like the one scheduled for March 5 — are primaries.

“Primaries” are elections in which voters belonging to a particular party select the candidate who will stand for that party in a general election. The truth is California no longer has elections like that for state offices or Congressional representatives. Fifty-four percent of California voters chose to eliminate such contests in June 2010 by approving Proposition 14.

But no one ever eliminated the name “primary.”

Prop. 14 was officially the Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act. Its proponents, good government groups, used primary because it was a familiar and legally tested term. But what it did was eliminate the primary and establish in its place a two-round, “top-two” system.

Under top two, our spring election is actually the opposite of a primary. It’s a general election in which candidates of every party are on the ballot together.

That means in California’s fall election — in which the two top finishers from the “primaries” faceoff — is also mislabeled. We call it a general election. But it’s actually a run-off election between the top two candidates from spring’s elections.

You might think this is a meaningless matter of nomenclature — a small-time fraud, like calling sparkling wine “Champagne.” But you’d be wrong. The “primary” lie suppresses turnout when it matters most: in the March elections.

Voters usually focus on November, when the whole country goes out to the polls. But California voters have more choices and power in the March election when their ballots have the widest variety of candidates.

For that reason, March is the election voters should prioritize. But they don’t. California’s turnout patterns are the same as they were before we eliminated primaries. In 2022, only 27% of eligible Californians cast ballots in the spring election, compared to 41% in November 2022.

If you’re a California voter, and you didn’t know any of this, don’t blame yourself. No one ever made it clear. There’s been no real educational effort to explain this reality and get Californians out to the polls for the more important spring election. Election officials, media, candidates — the whole world really — still call the first election “the primary” and treat it as if it’s a warm-up to November rather than the main event.

That’s hypocrisy. This state’s leaders and media routinely rail against misinformation and call themselves defenders of democracy’s democratic process — even as they repeat this basic and damaging “primary” misinformation every election year.

For more than a decade, I’ve been a lonely voice asking our leaders to correct themselves and label elections accurately. I’ve suggested alternatives to the “primary” label. I prefer “general” but would be happy with “first round” or “the main event” or “The Big One.”

I’ve gotten nowhere.

Some people simply don’t see the problem. Others acknowledge the error but say their hands are tied — because state law calls the spring election a “primary,” they need to

call it that, too.

But we shouldn’t give up. This year, let’s resolve to take The Big One seriously. If more Californians showed up at the polls on March 5, we’d get more representative verdicts on everything from our next U.S. senator to whether we want to change California’s mental health policies, as Prop. 1 proposes.

This year’s spring contest provides an unusually promising opportunity to address the labeling problem. Because this March there is a real primary on the ballot — the presidential primary — alongside the non-primary races for state and congressional seats. Prop. 14 didn’t abolish primaries for president, so Democrats and Republicans can separately choose their nominees.

Since this election contains both a primary and a general, state leaders could use the ballot to explain the distinction to the public. Donald Trump should win the California GOP presidential primary. His campaign is based on an election lie — that he won the 2020 contest. California leaders rightfully condemn him for that.

The problem is, they have their own record of lying about our elections. Sure, their lie is nowhere as dangerous as Trump’s election denialism. But it’s still a lie. Right now would be a wonderful moment to apologize and tell the truth about this election.

Brandon Bell/Getty Images Spring elections in California — like the one scheduled for March 5 — are called primaries but they really aren’t that at all.